It’s evening here, and the landlady and the television jack installation guy are in our tiny apartment in the basement. We have gotten over the self-consciousness of our horrible Czech with the landlady—pointing madly and gesturing, pantomiming with all sorts of ridiculous gestures—but when new people arrive, especially men for some reason, we become embarrassed again. I really can’t wait for this Czech class to begin. I know that we won’t become that much more fluent in only a year, but I can already feel what little Czech I did know from our three weeks of lessons in Plzen slipping away as we meet more English speakers and spend more time at the faculty with our impressively English-fluent colleagues. The class will be good, because I do want to learn Czech, I do want to be able to conduct basic conversations with folks, talk to them, stumble my way through a conversation by asking in Czech what word would fill in the hole in my vocabulary. It’s a wonderful opportunity to learn this language: studying it while living in the only country in the world where it is spoken. And as distant as my Czech ancestry is—and I especially feel its distance when I am asked by people at the faculty about the details (“Oh, my mother’s grandparents left Bohemia for the States as children in the 1880s, so really I’m more fourth than third generation, and really only a quarter Czech”)—I still feel like I am paying homage to my lineage in the only way I can. What else is my lineage? My dad was adopted into what is now my family name; he never knew his real father, who split when he was six months old. I’m as much Scottish as I am Czech, from my dad’s mother’s side, but I would never call myself Scottish, unless of course I went there, I suppose. My mom’s family, as unenthused as I was about them when I was growing up, are at least the family who stayed close. Hell, my dad only thought once a year or so to call his brother, who lived not three miles from our house the whole time. So where’s my lineage? It flows out from that piece of land in southern Indiana where my mom’s brothers have trailer homes, where they have lived since 1950 after leaving the immigrant neighborhood in Chicago, where my mom lived until she left home at 15 to escape her abusive father, and I must own all of that now with pride. And since my mom’s aunt Rose took the last memories of my grandmother’s generation to the grave with her a couple of years ago, and my mom’s death leaves only four of the seven second-generationers, I can pay homage to my lineage by spending some time here and learning at least some of the language and culture, not to keep it alive in the family, because really it is long dead, but to renew it, to reconnect with whatever we would have called roots, roots which were severed and withered during the twentieth century, when so much was severed and so much withered, when the world was torn apart and re-sewn so many times that the fabric began to fall apart. This is why I was so pissed off when a new acquaintance of ours, upon hearing my explanation for being here, dismissed it by saying ”oh, doin’ the roots thing, huh?” I don’t really care how many other doin’-the-roots-thingers have passed through your life in the ten years you’ve been in Brno, man, but I’m doing something here and I’d appreciate not being interrupted.

Non sequitur: Dave Eggers has aso cued me in on what I think has been my biggest difficulty with writing since I ever first tried it: self-consciousness. He was so in your face about it because he realized what I have long suspected: it’s impossible to escape self-consciousness. Or maybe he only agreed with me, for he is certainly not the first author to address the problem of who the narrator should be. And I agree with him: experience is the only authentic thing. Only the individual and unique sequence of moments is real. Everything else, and I mean everything else, is derivative, muted, matte, a shadow, a fiction, a phantom, nothing. Whenever I put myself in a position to try to describe experience, or a story derived from experience, I immediately run into that problem. The experience is an infinite range of meanings, and all the writing down of it does is remove most of the possibilities. The writing down of it closes it off in time, tells it from the present backward, assumes that enough distance has passed since the events being described that they can now be told and analyzed with enough hindsight to put them in their proper context. It closes off the future possibilities. You cannot write while you are still experiencing the thing, because you have to go home and sit down at your god-damned computer and put the words in sequential order, paint little pictures. So when it’s done, then you go to your computer—or your spiral notebook or microcassette recorder—and then you put the words in the right order like a good boy, and you try to convince someone else of how it was to be there. But if he had been there, just like you were, then you wouldn’t have to tell it, you wouldn’t have to put the words in any order at all, because he would already know. And sure, at that point, go ahead and compare the experience. Clearly not everyone in the same circumstance has the same reaction, pulls the same threads out of the tapestry. It’s the drawing of the experience for one who was not there that I see as the impossible task. And that’s where I have something to learn from the straight-up storyteller, because Andrew Wright, fine fella that he is, made me feel like I had been there. Dave Eggers, despite all the self-consciousness, also made me feel like I was there. It’s not impossible. It just demands patience and diligence.